1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to communications systems in general and, more specifically, the invention relates to a video compression technique suitable for use in an interactive multimedia information delivery system.
2. Description of the Background Art
Over the past few years, the television industry has seen a transformation in a variety of techniques by which its programming is distributed to consumers. Cable television systems are doubling or even tripling system bandwidth with the migration to hybrid fiber coax (HFC) cable plant. Customers unwilling to subscribe to local cable systems have switched in high numbers to direct broadcast satellite (DBS) systems. And, a variety of other approaches have been attempted focusing primarily on high bandwidth digital technologies, intelligent two way set top boxes, or other methods of trying to offer service differentiated from standard cable and over the air broadcast systems.
With this increase in bandwidth, the number of programming choices has also increased. Leveraging off the availability of more intelligent set top boxes, several companies such as Starsight Telecast Inc. and TV Guide, Inc. have developed elaborate systems for providing an interactive listing of a vast array of channel offerings, expanded textual information about individual programs, the ability to look forward to plan television viewing as much as several weeks in advance, and the option of automatically programming a VCR to record a future broadcast of a television program.
Unfortunately, the existing program guides have several drawbacks. They tend to require a significant amount of memory, some of them needing upwards of one megabyte of memory at the set top terminal (STT). They are very slow to acquire their current database of programming information when they are turned on for the first time or are subsequently restarted (e.g., a large database may be downloaded to a STT using only a vertical blanking interval (VBI) data insertion technique). Disadvantageously, such slow database acquisition may result in out of date database information or, in the case of a pay per view (PPV) or video on demand (VOD) system, limited scheduling flexibility for the information provider.
The use of compression techniques to reduce the amount of data to be transmitted may increase the speed of transmitting program guide information. In several communications systems, the data to be transmitted is compressed so that the available transmission bandwidth is used more efficiently. For example, the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) has promulgated several standards relating to digital data delivery systems. The first, known as MPEG-1 refers to ISO/IEC standards 11172 and is incorporated herein by reference. The second, known as MPEG-2, refers to ISO/IEC standards 13818 and is also incorporated herein by reference. A compressed digital video system is described in the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) digital television standard document A/53, and is incorporated herein by reference.
The above-referenced standards describe data processing and manipulation techniques that are well suited to the compression and delivery of video, audio and other information using fixed or variable rate digital communications systems. In particular, the above-referenced standards, and other xe2x80x9cMPEG-likexe2x80x9d standards and techniques, compress, illustratively, video information using intra-frame coding techniques (such as run-length coding, Huffman coding and the like) and inter-frame coding techniques (such as forward and backward predictive coding, motion compensation and the like). Specifically, in the case of video processing systems, MPEG and MPEG-like video processing systems are characterized by prediction-based compression encoding of video frames with or without intra- and/or inter-frame motion compensation encoding.
However, the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards have, in some instances, very strict elementary stream and transport stream formats, causing usage of extra bandwidth for certain applications. For example, if a number of interactive program guide (IPG) pages were created as video sequences, only limited number of pages could be encoded into a transport stream(s) at a specified bandwidth.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a video compression and decompression technique that enables an increased number of programs (video sequences) to be transmitted within an MPEG-2 transport stream(s).
The present invention is directed to stream indexing for delivery of an interactive program guide. These techniques overcome the above described problems and disadvantages.
In accordance with a first aspect of the present invention, a method of stream indexing for delivery of an interactive program guide comprises: assigning a first plurality of packet identifiers to program guide content for a current time period; and assigning a second plurality of packet identifiers to program guide content for a plurality of lookahead time periods.
In accordance with a second aspect of the present invention, a method of stream indexing for delivery of an interactive program guide (IPG) comprises: providing a plurality of video packet identifiers; assigning each video packet identifier to a corresponding guide page; providing a plurality of data packet identifiers, where the plurality of data packet identifiers is less in number than the plurality of video packet identifiers; predetermining a prime number which is less in number than or equal in number to the plurality of video packet identifiers; dividing each video packet identifier by the prime number in order to generate a remainder; and using the remainder to assign a data packet identifier to each video packet identifier.